Alfred Russel Wallace Medal: Professor Valentina Escott-Price

The Learned Society of Wales’s inaugural Alfred Russel Wallace Medal for Biosciences and Medicine has gone to Professor Valentina Escott-Price for her ground-breaking work in the understanding of dementia.  

Wales’s reputation for being at the forefront of research into neurodegenerative disease is in no small part due to the work of Valentina, who is a Professor of bioinformatics and biostatistics. 

She has an international reputation for the use of computation and machine-learning approaches in the understanding of dementia. This includes a recent study that applied machine learning to one of the world’s largest genetic datasets for Alzheimer’s disease. 

Her research has highlighted the role of sleep, head injuries, and mental health conditions in dementia, while helping to quantify the scale of the condition in Wales. Her deep expertise has seen her inform NHS preparedness for disease-modifying Alzheimer’s treatments and play an advisory role for the UK Government’s dementia strategy. 

Her prodigious publishing and grant capture records are complemented by a deep commitment to developing future generations of data scientists and maintaining Wales’s strength in the field.